How the Connected Home has Revolutionized Our Life

Disclaimer: I’ve been compensated by Best Buy in the form of a new Phillips hue A19 Starter Kit, Phillips hue Go personal wire free smart lights and a Netgear Router with DST adapter and Geek Squad service for free.

Technological advances are making life so much easier than it used to be. One of my favorite technological advances of today is the smart home. We live in such a busy world, getting busier every single day, that anything that makes life easier is a good thing in my book especially if it makes life with my family better.

The new Philips hue A19 Starter Kit and hue Go personal wire free smart lights 800 lumens are part of a Connected Home Story. The kit enables you to experience home lighting in a new way by adjusting colors, timers, alerts and more from your phone. It’s more than just the ability to turn lights on and off, it’s freedom from having to argue with your kids whether or not they turned their bathroom light off before they left the house.

It’s the ability to schedule lights to come on when you are traveling to deter burglars. It’s the ability to set wake up sunrises for the children by allowing lights to gradually come on at a set time versus the harsh blare of an alarm clock and it completely avoids the frustration that tends to ensue when a parent has to continually return to rouse an overtired child or belligerent tween or teen from bed after a late night of talking on the phone with friends.

The A19 starter kit allows you to experience home lighting and transform the way you use light by adjusting colors, timers, alerts and more from your phone or mobile device. The bulbs, accessory lights and bridge work with your Wi-Fi to let you create mood-setting color schemes, or enjoy the right light setting for reading, relaxing, concentrating and many more. You can also easily maintain an automatic schedule while you’re vacationing – so that it looks like you’re home.

It works with Apple HomeKit so you can control your lights with Siri voice control on your iPhone. Turns your existing hue lights into HomeKit controllable lights and discover exciting new use cases through 3rd party homekit apps that also control door locks thermostats and more.

It’s so versatile, you can use it as personal reading light in a dark room, create bright lighting in a room with little existing lighting or no electrical outlets, use it as a kid’s night light, or take it outside to provide ambience on the patio. It also helps you to wake up fresh and energized in the morning with deep dimming. The gradually increasing light intensity gives you the feeling you are waking up from sunrise – gently and naturally. My kids love this and it’s so much gentler than startling them awake by turning on bright lights.

The lights offer 5 patented “natural dynamic effects”: Cozy Candle, Sunday Coffee, Meditation, Enchanted Forest, and Night Adventure. Each dynamic effect has its own mix of colors to set the right mood. You can also choose from fine-tuned shades of white including the soothing “Relax” setting, the vibrant “Energize” setting and more – no need for buying different white bulbs

The Netgear® Nighthawk™ DST Router and DST Adapter with Geek Squad included, new and exclusively at Best Buy provides an easy, all-in-one solution to support your home’s connected devices.

As the number of Wi-Fi dependent products increase in a home they put a strain on the home’s network, especially the router. With the interest in online gaming and 4k TVs, connected devices such as smart thermostats, plus the need to stream shows from Netflix or hulu, it places even more demands on the network. Many households may experience slow Wi-Fi, dropped calls, or experience “dead zones” – which could be improved upon with an “AC” router, Wi-Fi extenders and expert help.

The AC1900 comes with one DST, or “Dead Spot Terminator,” adapter – to eliminate your Wi-Fi dead zones. Additional adapters can be purchased for other dead zones.

This high-performance router was built to support 10+ connected devices – you can also prioritize devices for streaming videos or music, and included advanced features for lag-free gaming. So the girls can be streaming Netflix, I can watch a movie on PLEX while the Big Guy plays Call of Duty and all the laptops and iPad are charging and there is no worry about lags in show playing.

We love having a connected home. Lights are just the beginning. We can control the thermostat, the electronics and make our home safer for all of us.

Latina. Girl mom of 2. Married to my college sweetheart.Digital Storyteller. Lover of travel, food and fashion. Chicago girl. I write because it's how I process the world. I share because I want you to know that you're not alone.